There is a lot of new data coming out regarding drunk driving. The NHTSA has released new figures and some of the news is good – Fatalities from DUI accidents decreased last year. Total deaths amounted to under 12,000 instead of 13,000. Again, that’s good news. But does it mean the number of drunk drivers is decreasing? Or does it at least mean that people aren’t getting as drunk before driving? I don’t think so. Fortunately, the overall number of traffic fatalities declined also. This is the most likely explanation.
There are so many other factors at play. Every year, the overall safety of cars on the road improves as new models come out and old clunkers get replaced. Consider the safety of the ‘average’ car today versus the ‘average’ car of 10 or 15 years ago. Is the economy keeping more people from going out to drink? It will be interesting to see these numbers worked out per capita. And the next census will be a statistical game-changer. Meanwhile, there is lots that can be done with the numbers.
For example, there is a new DUI fatality map out there by MapLarge.com. The “Fatal DUI Clusters” map shows all locations in America which have had multiple traffic fatalities. It can be seen at duimap.org.
DUImap.Org is described as a ‘heat map’ of DUI traffic fatality clusters. I don’t know what time period they use for their data and I couldn’t find it on their website, but it probably doesn’t matter. It looks like all around our coastlines, your chances of dying in your car are far greater. In particular, it makes California, Florida, and the entire Eastern third of the nation look like very dangerous places to be. Now you would figure that places with higher populations would have more DUI fatalities. So I’m thinking you could produce a representation of a population map using DUI data. Sure enough, here is a side-by-side comparison of the duimap.org map and a US population map from mapofusa.net …
DUImap.org's clustermap
Population Map
The map on the left is the DUI Cluster Map. The map on the right is the Population Map. You can see they look amazingly similar.
The DUI Fatalities Map on our Home page (click the “DUI Fatality Rates” link above the map) shows DUI related fatality statistics. But our map looks very different from these two!
On our map, red is a very high rate of DUI fatalities, orange is high, yellow is average and green is low. We seem to show a high concentration of death in exactly the places that DUImap shows little activity. When you drill down into individual states (as you can do on the DUI Cluster map as well as ours) you can see the opposite discrepancy, where we tend to show lower DUI fatality rates in coastal areas, while the DUI Cluster map shows higher rates these same areas.
DUI Fatality Rates
Those are some great stats.
Nice work guys. I think your population adjusted numbers make a lot of sense on a state wide or even county scale. At DUI Map we looked at using a population or traffic count offset on the micro level but concluded that demographics were less relevant than actual traffic counts. The traffic count metrics available were patchy and inconsistent across jurisdictions so we opted for the unadjusted data that I think works pretty well on a micro level. For example the Thorton freeway in Dallas seems well explained by traffic counts (crazy curves) but Old National Highway in south Atlanta shows massive concentrations that neither population nor traffic counts explain but on a county or state level they are smoothed out and invisible. Ideally the system would use traffic count metrics on a per road segment data to highlight outliers like that but we opted to let users do it rather than using patchy traffic counts on the micro level. An even better metric would be if we took the data from our sister site Risky Roads and compared non DUI fatalities to DUI related fatalities. That would help remove road segments are just high volume or tricky. If I get time next month I will push out a new version using our new block group level mapping api.
I wish your stat. of total deaths of 12,000 was broken down to reflect how many innocent people were killed by drunk drivers. How many of those deaths were only the drunk driver and their passengers were involved. Drunk pedestrians killed while walking or biking. I have also read that a drunk passenger killed in a sober persons car gets counted in this number. any info would be great..thanks